A Winter Of Angels

Acknowledgements

Well, I hope you enjoy this story. This is a short story I wrote a couple months ago. Mostly I write horror but it is nice to write a heartwarming tale every now and then.

All of my stories stem from something I experienced or thought. And this story, A Winter Of Angels, is about the magic of childhood nostalgia.

I decided to write a story like this after traveling back to my hometown and seeing how much of it was the same but also how much had changed.

It kind of made me sad because I had grown up in this town and had dreamed about going back but when I did it felt different. It was the same town, but at the same time it wasn't.

So much so, that it reminded me of the book Hearts In Atlantis by Stephen King and the film that accompanies it.

I had recently checked out the film and it made me feel the same way that that moment in my life had.

I wanted to write a book that was reminiscent of Hearts In Atlantis and Slingblade. Would it suck or would it be a magical tale of nostalgia and life experiences? Well, that was up for the reader to decide.

As an author, you can't enjoy your own work the same way your readers can. That being because you see the flaws. You see how it was written. How the scenes will and are being put together. Who lives and who dies. There is no surprise in your own work.

Your readers will be surprised because they don't know who's going to die, where the story is going to go, what happens next, or pretty much anything for that matter. They're just in for the ride. And what a ride those turn out to be.

This isn't saying that authors hate their work. We most certainly do not. Otherwise, we wouldn't have made them if we didn't feel that they had at least some sort of significance in the whole grand scheme of things.

Like I have told people, scars are stories worth telling. Otherwise you wouldn't have undergone them in the first place. Yes they hurt, but hurt is just a way of knowing it is impactful and a learning experience.

I think out of all I do, writing is my strongsuit. I prefer writing books, songs and poems way more than anything else. Mostly because it comes directly from me. Just ask my mother, I had and still have journals scattered all over the house full of jottings that tell a story.

All of my stories are dedicated to certain people in my life. Diamonds (In The Attic) is dedicated to my mother. Dreamaster 1 and 2 are dedicated to my father. KIN is dedicated to my brother Milo. The Book Of Secrets Long Begotten is dedicated to my grandmother. The Stonewater County Murders (a story I have yet to add here) is dedicated to my stepfather. A Winter Of Angels is dedicated to my closest friends.

Some of these friends do not know each other but someday I hope their paths cross like they have with me. And they are as follows:

Michael McCune, August Melcer, Ethan Mooney (who is in all honesty the real Ethan Hollow), Katherine aka Purple Dragon, D'Kaylon Profit, Nathaniel Washington, Braxton Morris, Will Bohall, Jackson Gilmore, Jase Montemeyer, Nathaniel Denton, Adam Foust, Jacob and Brayden Yeazel, Darius Johnson, Will Simmons, Layla Bohall, Klint Bohall, Jeanie Fuller, Jeremy Thompson, Bobby Sands who made me love theatre and the art of acting, Ashley Gutierrez, Kay and Bob Sheehy who have enjoyed my writing and helped me out with math which I still suck at but am way better than I was, Weston Davis, Ashley Davis, Ashton aka trashcan I know you hate that name lol, Jacqueline Hupp who is in all honesty the best chemistry teacher I have ever had like seriously you rock!, Delsia Contreras, Mrs. Rogers, Richard Contreras, Mickey Scott, Mr. Shade, and everyone else I couldn't think of naming. A Winter Of Angels is your story so enjoy it.

I also want to point out and thank certain things and people for giving me hope and inspiration all these years like:

Metal, Symphony, Electronic, Rock, New Age, and Hip Hop music.

Also the employees at Dunder Mifflin Paper Company as well as the fellows down at Wernham Hogg. Thanks for giving me entertainment and enjoyment and feeling relaxed and having a good laugh when life was just so crazy and I couldn't take it.

Ghost Adventures, Stephen King" Edgar Allan Poe, Buzzfeed Unsolved, EPIC Paranormal, whatshallwedonext, RL Stine, and etc. Thanks fir giving me good scares and some fun reads along the way.

Thanks to movie directors such as Eli Roth, Ari Aster, Leigh Whannell, Jordan Peele, Steven Spielberg, John Hughes, Frank Darabont, M. Night Shyamalan, James Wan, James Gunn, Lee Kirk, John Krasinski, Stobe Harju, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, John Carpenter, George Romero, Stanley Kubrick, and Alfred Hitchcock for all the awesome movies I indulge myself in pretty much all the time.

I want to thank my friends and family for always believing in me and helping me do what I do best: tell stories.

I've always had a joy in writing. Some of my fondest memories involve me sitting down at a table and writing down whatever scenes and lines came from my head. My mom, like I said earlier, would find scattered pages and journals everywhere and when she read them, let's just say she wasn't disappointed lol!

I have some authors I'd like to thank and here they are:

Charles Dickens, HG Wells, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, GK Chesterton, Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Ray Bradbury, RL Stine, Walt Whitman, Max Lucado, William Peter Blatty, Shel Silverstein, Chris Van Allsburg, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Stephen Crane, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Kate Chopin, Kate DiCamillo, Hans Christian Andersen, EB Whits, Aesop, Henry David Thoreau, and many more who have written stories that will forever live in my heart forever and ever. I am so eternally grateful for your words and tales you have undoubtedly opened up a world of imagination to me and I could never thank each and every one of you enough for that.

Well, I am running out of things to say and people to thank but there is still one more person to thank. And that someone is you. The reader. I want to thank you for reading my books. For sitting down through all of my long ass acknowledgements and from the bottom of my heart and each fiber of my soul, I thank you. Because with you, I am able to do what I love and by God do I love doing it!

If you had a childhood and miss it dearly. Then this book is for you. If you miss the magic, the misery, the heartache and heartbreak. If you miss the life you had then because it was then that life was so magical. The world could mean or be anything you wanted it to.

But now we are older, a little wiser, a little bolder, a little closer to death. But through stories like this one you are soon to read, we can keep the past from dying and being buried in the deep dark frail end behind us. These stories live on and that is truly the power in words. And also, it is the power which lies in belief.